If health is a
human right, a right of
everyone, because
all humans have "inherent value" (whatever the heck that is), then how the bejesus do you figure you can possibly justify our government confiscating people's resources in order to provide health
to Americans?!?...
I must admit that I'm stumped. Very few human rights are realisable when one state is burdened with the obligation to provide for the entire world's population.
That depends on which things are human rights. When the concept of human rights was invented, they were easily realizable, because they didn't cost much, because the concept was much more about having the right to be left alone than about having the right to make other people do stuff for you. For instance, the U.S. Bill of Rights lists 36 distinct human rights. 35 of those are rights to have other people not do stuff to us. 1 of them is a right to make other people do stuff for us*. Universal human rights only become too big a burden for a state to realize when we loose our self-imposed reins on our power over others, and keep adding more and more rights to make other people serve us.
(* That 1 right is the right to make a witness testify at your trial.)
Healthcare for all is a desirable goal, but I think it's unreasonably burdensome while we lack the political structure to set up an effective system of that scope and scale.
The point of calling it a "right of Americans" is to short-circuit the discussion of where the line between unreasonably burdensome and reasonably burdensome is, deny that "unreasonably burdensome" is a valid concept, and poison the well by calling anybody who wants to have that discussion a medical mass murderer.
I guess it shows that utilitarianism is useful as a guide to domestic policy but creates unreasonable demands when applied at a global scale.
It isn't though. If we were using utilitarianism as a useful guide to domestic policy, the question we'd ask about Obamacare is whether it speeds up or slows down our economy's growth, because a faster-growing economy will let us spend more on foreign aid, which is where we can get the biggest utilitarian bang for our buck.
The ranking of values expressed by "Do Americans have a right to decent health care, or just a privilege, a privilege withdrawn if it means the rich lose tax cuts." is as follows:
1. Americans' lives
2. Americans' property rights
3. Foreigners' lives
"Maximize the total happiness of Americans" is not a rough-and-ready approximation of "Maximize the total happiness of humans." It's an
opposing principle. Calling it "utilitarianism" is the most hypocritical moral theory since Jefferson said "All men are created equal, they have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I'm keeping my 200 slaves."
I see your point, and I recognise that there's something missing from my reasoning to avoid such unreasonable demands on people. As I said above, utilitarianism is useful for public policy, but perhaps there needs to be some provision that avoids the need to inflict serious pain on one person in order to prevent slightly more pain in another person. There's considerable difference between confiscating a person's property and confiscating their organs.
There certainly is; but there isn't as far as the "Maslow's hierarchy of needs represents the way in which humans tend to prioritise their needs." argument is concerned. The point isn't that it's wrong to take people's money to pay for health; the point is that if you want to show "Americans have a right to decent health care, not just a privilege, and their right trumps rich people's right to their property." you need a better argument than that.
I don't think that would be the appropriate response in the context of this thread. Firstly, this a is thread about the morality of UHC. Secondly, Bomb#20 raised a clear objection to UHC: that taxpayers should not be required to pay for it because such a system requires that we take property from some people to provide healthcare for others.
No, I didn't. Go back and check if you don't believe me -- see if you can find anything that looks like a moral claim. I raised clear objections to unsound arguments.
